Dahme 3

In the Asphalt City and Along the Lake

Here it is the end of May (eek, no, it's June, and I still haven't posted this!), and the days are immense and bright. The birds are making a racket outside the windows at three-something in the morning, and when I came home from a concert the other night at a quarter to ten, you could still have read a book in the open street by natural light. At least if the print was big enough. 

In the winter I can see about to the end of the block. But now, from the study window, I can tell the evergreens from the broadleaf trees in Rehberge Park, four kilometers away; and beyond that I can see the blue-green folds of the plateau north of the city, maybe twenty kilometers out. The forest-leaves are thick and dark by now, the summer-shadow is under the trees. 

Already early in May, when I finished up the Berlin stretch of the Dahme, the leaves were getting thick down here, screening the water in the not-so-many places where you could get close to it.

Along the Dahme, Schmöckwitz, May 2015. My photo.

A little orientation is in order, perhaps. Here we are southeast of Berlin, looking north-west into the city. The water that goes wobbling off to the upper left in the photo below is the Long Lake, the Langer See, the stretch of the River Dahme that I have been walking along.  Off to the right, in the middle distance of the picture, goes the Seddinsee, a lake that is not part of the Dahme. The course of the river goes through the Zeuthener See, which is down in the lower left of the picture. The inhabited blob of land between the lakes, almost but not quite an island, is Schmöckwitz, an old fishing village which is now the last neighborhood in Berlin before we hit the Brandenburg border. (And that left-to-right strip of water that you can just see, high up on the right of the picture, is the Müggelsee; see Spree 10 post, last July.)

Schmöckwitz and surrounding lakes. Photo, Matthias Renner, Wiki Commons.

Well, the lakes have all been there for a long time, but the inhabitants of the shoreline come and go. Back in the early 1950s, the red-roofed establishment in the woods on the right of the Zeuthener See was  the "Ferienheim [vacation home] Bertolt Brecht" for forestry workers. The East Germans were keen on these sort of hostel-like holiday camps named after Communist culture heroes, where people could have vacations in supervised groups, doing organized outdoor activities. 

it's hard to imagine Brecht himself enjoying this sort of healthy outdoor groupism, however: 

     In der Asphaltstadt bin ich daheim. Von allem Anfang
     Versehen mit jedem Sterbsakrament:
     Mit Zeitungen. Und Tabak. Und Branntwein.
     Misstrauisch und faul und zufrieden am End. ['Vom armen B.B.']

     I'm at home in the asphalt city. From the start
     Furnished with every last rite:
     With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy.
     Mistrustful and lazy and content at the end.

Can anyone see B.B. out there joining the morning calisthenics? Nah.

Still, the lakeside establishment was a nice enough place, and maybe it was a sign of hardening of the arteries in the East German system that by the end of the 1960s it wasn't available to ordinary workers any more. (Or did it became clear that forestry workers didn't especially want vacations in the forest?) The place was turned over to the leaders of the umbrella organization for East German unions, who used it as a conference center. 

Then a Japanese private university bought it in the early 90s, at a time when the Japanese were still buying lots of things. Ex-communist vacation spots in eastern Europe, floundering small colleges in the US.  Loretto Heights, the Catholic women's college in Denver that planted its red-sandstone Romanesque up on the highest point in the city, was bought out by the same Japanese university a little earlier, the year the Berlin Wall fell. 

What shall we make of this, that these iron hierarchical organizations, the Church and the Party, have faded away from the lakeshore and the heights--and been replaced by establishments like the one in Denver that offers TOEFL prep courses and unaccredited business degrees to almost anyone who can write a check? People's ideas of what it takes to make your way in a difficult world have changed. 

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There's a lot of private property and fencing down here on this stretch of the Dahme; we're almost out of the city, and public life is fading out.  But every now and then you can get back to the water: here's a bit of open beach along the river.

Along the Dahme, Schmöckwitz, May 2015. My photo.

It's getting to be sailing weather and there are a lot of boats out of winter storage, at their moorings, ready to go:

Along the Zeuthener See, May 2015. My photo.

Now and then there's even one out on the water, though not many on this chilly weekday.

On the Zeuthener See, May 2015. My photo.

There's a public footpath along the water for a little way, which dead-ends at this lovely creampuff of a neo-rococo villa, built around 1910 by the owner of what was then the biggest department store in Berlin, as a gift for his fiancee.

Hertzog Villa, Zeuthen, May 2015. My photo.

The lakes have been here for a long time and the inhabitants of the shoreline have come and gone. For a while in Cold War days the villa was the residence of the Soviet ambassador. Later the Stasi (E. German secret police) used it as a guesthouse. After reunification the villa was picked up by the Dussmann Group, which put a lot of money into renovations (the Stasi not being known for its historically-sensitive aesthetics). 

Dussmann is a funny outfit: one of these German-based, internationally active, highly competent family firms with fingers in diverse pies. They own the big serious book and music store in Berlin (go-to place for classical music scores, for example: you can try out the scores on the piano in the store before buying), but they're mostly a service-contracting firm. If your company--in Germany or eastern Europe or China or Vietnam or the Persian Gulf--needs catering or cleaning or security or plumbing/ heating /electricity technical services, or in-house child care, Dussmann supplies it. They also run a lot of assisted living/ nursing home establishments in Germany. They use the villa on the Zeuthener See for meetings and events and some corporate training. 

They seem to be doing quite well financially, though I'm not sure that your typical intro business course would say that child care, security services, plumbing, and classical music scores were a strategically well-integrated portfolio. 

I walk on south, down along the Zeuthener See more or less, but it's hard to stay by the water. Eventually I give up and cut across through a patch of woods, the Zeuthener Heath. If I can't see the water, at least I'll see something of Zeuthen, a little Brandenburg town that is not, so far as I know, distinguished for much besides having an S-Bahn station.  

Zeuthener Heide, May 2015. My photo.

The woods are full of springtime light. Let's see, we come out of the trees by the discount grocery, and then we should turn south .... Agh, the street I have got myself on is going altogether the wrong way, I missed a turn somewhere. This happens to me so often, and on perfectly straightforward routes like this one. But if I go back to the intersection with the big spring-bulb bed, then I should be able to get myself back on track:

Intersection of Schillerstrasse and Schulstrasse, Zeuthen, May 2015. My photo.

Ah, this is not bad at all. Here are chestnuts coming into bloom along Schulstrasse (School Street), clusters of white candles high in the air, lighting up the street.  Here are thick stretches of forget-me-nots in bloom around my ankles.

Forget-me-nots, Schulstrasse, Zeuthen, May 2015. My photo.

Then this big block of a building coming up must be the school that School Street is named for. It will be interesting to see whom the school itself is named for, out in this piece of the old-East quasi-countryside. Schools here are mostly named for culture-heroes--scientists and artists and the like--unlike the US, where public schools, at least when I was a child, tended to be named for geographic locations (Central, West), or local politicians whom no one could remember, or a few uncontested national heroes like Lincoln and Washington and Franklin. In our neighborhood in Berlin, the grade school across the river is named for Miriam Makeba, the South African singer. The neighborhood high school is named for Adolf Menzel, the painter of Prussian historical scenes and life in mid-nineteenth-century Berlin (construction, railroads, beer gardens):

Adolf Menzel, In the Beer Garden. Photo, Wiki Commons. 

So who is the culture hero down in these parts? The older part of the building looks late-20s-early-30s: dark brick with geometric texturing and figures of healthy youth in short pants, looking like types who would have enjoyed group activities at the Ferienheim Bertolt Brecht down the river. (Ah, it's not fair to snipe at such things; just because I don't like healthy group activities--"organized whee," in Robertson Davies' immortal phrase--that doesn't mean they're all bad ...)

Paul-Dessau-Gesamtschule, Zeuthen. May, 2015, my photo.

So--slow down, peer, cross street--who is this school named for?  Good Lord, it's Archangel's cousin Paul Dessau. Distant cousin, from the Communist branch of the family. The man who wrote somewhat forgettable music for Brecht's plays in the 1940s and 50s, after Brecht and Weill had split up. 

They had all fled to America in the Nazi-time, Brecht and Weill and Dessau--and then the question comes, what do you do afterward, when it's possible to go home, and when home is a bombed-out mess with an uncertain future? Weill stayed in the US and wrote songs for Broadway musicals and died at fifty. Brecht and Dessau went back to East Berlin with the intention of helping to build a democratic socialist society, and lived long enough to see some dubious results. And all this probably has nothing whatever to do with the quality of the music. How Weill's music lights up the words of the songs and makes them fly-- and Dessau's doesn't, alas. (One of the Brecht-Weill songs was on the Doors' first album in the 1960s, along with "Light My Fire," and with all due respect I find it hard to imagine a Paul Dessau song having such an after-life.)   

I remember the first time I saw the Threepenny Opera, in a high-school production in rural Germany to which the Goethe-Institut hauled us off one night when I was there to learn German in the 1970s. Mack the Knife was played by a visiting non-German teacher with a bad accent, and the props tended to fall over. But oh, the songs flew, and people sang bits of them in the Goethe-Institut hallways afterward (und ein Schiff mit acht Segeln, und mit fünfzig Kanonen ...), and the live-wire types in the class took names from the play. Our Mack the Knife was a Turkish dentist named Attila. 

I had actually heard the Brecht-Dessau songs earlier, but they didn't make any impression. In my last year in college in Denver, the university theater department put on a production of A Man's a Man, with the music by Dessau. Jim, who lived downstairs from my roommate and me, had a part in the play and was bellowing the songs on the stairways and in the kitchen under ours for months. But I don't really remember the songs, just the bellowing. He was a vigorous solid young man, Jim was, and he did thunder on the flimsy floors and stairways of the building. (Ach, how terribly they build in the US, especially in the West, all plywood held together with little staples. A strong young man running down the stairs and bellowing A man's a man will shake the building.)

Farther down the street, I pass the Zeuthen fire department, which has treated their building to a mural:

Feuerwehr, Zeuthen, May 2015. My photo.

Handsomely done, fire department.

It isn't far now to the S-Bahn station, which is a fairly handsome place also. A row of alternating pink- and white-flowering trees marches pleasantly beside the tracks. But this is all too far out in the country for me--this is Brandenburg, it's time to get back to the Asphaltstadt--though surely Berlin is the greenest Asphaltstadt in the world?.